Saturday, August 24, 2013

My Amazon Review of Michael Fullilove's, "Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordniary Men Took America into War and into the World"

It is late 1939
and war has broken out in Europe. Roosevelt doesn't trust Joe Kennedy, his
ambassador to the Court of Saint James. He desperately needs information on
the willingness of Britain to fight and later on the status of Stalin's Russia
under the onslaught of the Nazi blitzkrieg. Instead of relying on the usual
State Department sources in an era before the OSS/CIA, Roosevelt sends five
special emissaries to Europe to find out what is going on and what role, short
of war, the United States could play.

He dispatches five extraordinary
people to Europe. Sumner Wells of the State Department, Bill Donovan, a
Republican lawyer from New York who would soon found the OSS, Wendell Willkie
his recently defeated opponent, Averill Harriman a Democrat who happens to be a
banker and railroad tycoon who ends up sleeping with Churchill's niece (Pamela,
a doyen of Washington society much later), and the indomitable and in the
process of dying Mr. Fixit of the New Deal, Harry Hopkins. It is their stories
that Fullilove tells and what stories they are. There are meetings in London,
Rome, Berlin and Moscow and the reports his emissaries send him, girds
Roosevelt's loins for the titanic struggle ahead.

The book captures the
foreign policy scene of 1939-41 and if the reader doesn't have time to read the
formal biographies of the Five, you certainly will gain quite a bit of insight
here.

About Me

David Shulman is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Baruch College where he mentors students seeking front-office careers on Wall Street, a Senior Economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast and was a Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin. He retired from Lehman Brothers where he was Managing Director and Head REIT analyst. From 2001-04 he was voted on the Institutional Investor All Star Teams including First Team in 2002. Prior to joining Lehman he was a Member at Ulysses Management LLC (1998-99).
From 1986-1997 Mr. Shulman was employed by Salomon Brothers Inc in various capacities. He was Director of Real Estate Research from 1987-91 and Chief Equity Strategist from 1992-97. He was widely quoted in print and electronic media and he coined the terms “Goldilocks Economy” and “New Paradigm Economy.” In 1991 he was named a Managing Director and in 1990 he won the first annual Graaskamp Award for Excellence in Real Estate Research from the Pension Real Estate Association.
A graduate of Baruch College (1964), Mr. Shulman received his Ph.D. (1975) with a specialization in Finance and a M.B.A. (1966) from the UCLA Graduate School of Management.